It's a little known fact that much of the Queens subway lines were built when the area was still mostly farmland. Check this article out: http://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/2010/06/the-futureny...
We Americans are fond of saying that we can't have muni rail because our cities aren't dense enough. Well, reliable rail is the only thing that allows for greater density. In some cases city planners are starting to realize this and work with developers to add density and transit simultaneously. But it takes real leadership (or cojones, depending on your view) to build municipal rail that won't reach its potential for ten or twenty years -- but that's exactly what happened in New York and it has seemed to pay of very well.
There's a wonderful documentary on the NYC subway. At the end of the director's career - he basically stated he could keep building the subway for as long as he wanted - the subway would still fill to capacity.
I think one of the biggest problems was caused by the interstate system that went through cities. I can understand ring roads - but cities like Hartford, Providence, and Worcester are cleaved in two. It's just horrible.
It looks like your account was killed (maybe due to being inactive for 562 days?).
The car is the most inefficient, economically infeasible mode of transit known to human kind. For distances over 20 miles, if you can't beat car travel for a family of 4 (about 8 cents per mile per person) you suck at your job.
Airlines should be aiming for $0.05 per mile per person. If you pack people that tightly, there's no reason that it shouldn't be possible. European airlines do it. Fire deadwood (start with your 389 VPs) until you can deliver a fair price.
Last minute tickets and upper class tickets subsidize "cheap" fares.
There are the "gamey" cheap fares ($25 for NYC-LAX) that obviously exist to draw people in but don't actually produce profit, and then there are reasonably cheap ones ($150-300) on which the airline still makes a profit. There's no reason the latter needs to be offset by outright robbery (which the last-minute effect is).
The problem with the airlines is that they aren't even good at being greedy. They need to be bailed out every 3 years or so. If they were making "too much" profit, the solution would be obvious: buy their stock. But that's not the problem. The reason the tickets are so expensive is that they have hundreds of unnecessary executives paid 6- and 7-figure salaries to do absolutely nothing.
Like many other critics of cars, you seem to implicitly consider the value of travellers' time to be negligible, so that you don't need to consider it even in a context where they are talking about a cost meter ticking at 8 cents per minute or so.
There are annoying rhetorical tricks in the other direction employed by fans of cars, like pointedly ignoring the cost of pollution or pointedly pretending that expensive required-by-law facilities (notably parking) are not costs. But as much as those pro-car rhetorical tricks distort reality, they seldom seem to distort the reality of the situation as badly as the anti-car trick of treating the value of the traveller's time as negligible. Across the people who can afford to travel by car, "negligible compared to $4.80/hr" is an extremely bad approximation for the value of time.
Furthermore, I think you might have a skewed sense of what a fair price is to fly 2,500 miles. A flight from Lisbon to Moscow (about the same distance) is more expensive than a flight from LA to NYC. It is a long way and expensive to operate planes. Last minute tickets and upper class tickets subsidize "cheap" fares. If you want to convert an airline over to fixed price tickets, the ticket price would likely be considerably higher than what you deem "fair."
Finally, the way cities are built in the US does not lend themselves to public transit. NYC has decent transit because the population density is so high as to make it the only viable option. There are no other cities in the US like that with the exception of maybe San Francisco which has a significantly smaller population. In Europe, many cities are high density and have good mass transit. Unless we encourage density, we're unlikely to see good urban mass transit since most people would rather drive all things being equal.